Pages

Sunday, 26 August 2012

OBAMA ‘KEEP GREECE IN’ STORY: Disinformation at its best (or worst)

From the slog

Oliver Wright’s piece in The Independent
last Friday had Obama lobbying for the EU to stave off Grexit until
after the Presidential Election in November. I think there are holes in
the story.
In these days of multiply-layered briefings, ID cloning and
geopolitical cyber-bollocks, it’s getting hard for anyone to tell truth
from spin and data from disinformation. However, for Oliver Wright’s
revelation of Obaman lobbying to be entirely accurate, a number of
unlikely realities would have to be in place:
1. Hillary Clinton at State and Tim Geithner at the Fed Treasury to
be running a rogue foreign policy without the Black Dude’s knowledge.
Sorry, I don’t buy it.
2. Obama believing that either Brussels or Berlin really wants to see
a Grexit right now. For obvious Iberio-Italian reasons, everyone from
the CIA to Warren Buffet must be telling him it just ain’t so.
3. Antonis Samaras being genuinely worried that the eurozone members
might throw him out when the Troika reports. He doesn’t believe that for
a minute.
Time to get real, I think. With one short press on the printing
button, the US could wipe out the Greek debt and immediately neutralise
any ‘contagion’ on Wall Street. With connections to every creditor
beyond the ECB (which has already agreed to take a crewcut on Athenian
borrowing) corporate America could rest assured that the President had
protected them. With such a move, the Obamites could show how US reach
still blows anyone else out of the water, that Barry is completely in
control, and that Romney’s potential isolationism would be dangerous in
the extreme.
Obama would be able to go into the Election showing how US foreign
policy was correctly plugged in to every threat to Blessed America –
from Eurozone meltdown to Iranian fission.
In that context, why would the Democratic auto-nominee want to lobby Brussels?
I think it highly likely that some White House and State folks have
checked out Berlin just to be double-dog certain that the lunatic fringe
possibilities are close to zero. And I do not doubt that the President
ticked Cameron’s boxes in a similar fashion in relation to London-based
Hedgies doing something stupid.
But lobbying for the EU to hold off the firing squad? Bollocks. There
is no firing squad: and even if there was, there is no reason to load
anything but blanks. If BO was lobbying for anything, I suspect it was
for Berlin to hold off on any eurozone departures of its own.
So who might the sources have been for Wright’s article?
Well, he refers to ‘British Government sources’, but Mr Wright is the Indie’s Whitehall
correspondent. In short, he talks to the Sir Humphreys more than the
Camerlots. I’d be reasonably certain his sources lie somewhere inside
the labyrinthine renovation known as the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office (FCO).
The problem with the FCO is that they are focused on Washington, not
Berlin. They are US stooges – not a bulwark against Merkelism. And their
feedback from the EU loop is at best patchy, at worst gullible.
Let’s wait and see. This is a wicked web being woven. But my hunch is
that the Indie’s story could be the result of anything from loopy FCO
hubris to a pernicious UK Establishment bid to favour Romney by making
the President look dumb.